In the jungle

The Bolivian rainforest. It was incredible, undoubtedly one of our favourite places, so I will try to do it justice. We flew (in the smallest plane I have ever been in - Sam had to bend double just to get down the aisle) to Rurrenebaque in Beni department, north-east of La Paz. It's 3000 metres lower than La Paz and much much hotter. We stayed one night in Rurre trying to get used to the heat and the beasts and then left early the next morning to take a 5 hour boat ride up the Beni and Tuichi rivers, both tributaries of the Amazon. Our destination was the Madidi National Park, a protected area of tropical rainforest the size of Denmark. It is one of the most biologically diverse places on the planet but also very fragile. We were staying at a place called Chalalan, a lodge built and run entirely by a local community of Quechua-Tacana indigenous people. A group of young people from the village, frustrated by poverty, lack of employment opportunities in such a remote place and lack of support from the government, came up with the idea of an "eco-lodge" where they could revive their ancestral traditions and also make money for the community without exploiting their natural resources. They bring small groups of tourists to the lodge, teach them about the wildlife, their traditions and the forest without damaging it in any way. All the profits from the lodge go straight back to the village and it provides them with much needed employment close to their families. The lodge is named after the Chalalan lagoon around which the cabins have been built. Apparently it's enchanted and anyone who bathes in it is granted eternal youth so obviously we jumped straight in not long after arriving. We were told that it was perfectly safe to bathe in despite the caymans who live in it. They can live for a hundred years and grow to a length of 5 metres but luckily I only found that out on our last night otherwise I might not have spent quite so much time swimming.

We spent the next two and a half days doing various hikes and boat trips with our guide Alejandro. He grew up in the forest hunting with his uncle and knew everything about the animals, the plants and traditional uses for them. They have cures for an amazing variety of ailments: arthritis, kidney stones, even a tree whose sap helps to knit broken bones. Alejandro was also able to call to various birds and animals so we could track them and get a closer look. He would suddenly stop in the middle of the trail, make some unearthly howling/warbling/screaming noise, listen intently and then dive off into the undergrowth madly beckoning at us to follow. We went canoing on the lake to watch the three types of monkeys who live in the trees around it - we saw howlers (large, red-haired a bit like small orangutans), capuchins (medium sized with white faces) and squirrel monkeys (very small and chattery with yellow fur). There are also black spider monkeys who live much deeper in the forest but thanks to Alejandro's crazy noises we were able to see them as well. We also saw a river otter and a margay which is a kind of jungle cat, like a small jaguar.

We went for a night hike - quite an eerie experience. All of the frogs and insects come out at night and make a terrific noise and without a torch it's pitch black, you can't even see your hand in front of your face. You have a creepy awareness that hundreds of creatures around you can see, hear and smell you but you can't see them. A type of jungle chicken which lives in the forest around the lake makes a kind of hoarse heavy breathing noise which only added to the eerieness. We saw a little poisonous snake, various tiny tree frogs and a couple of small mammals. We didn't see any spiders on the night hike (Sam was disappointed, I was quite relieved) but Alejandro thoughtfully found a tarantula's nest for us the next day and coaxed out a rather large mummy tarantula using a twig with a bit of spit on the end. She scampered about in a rage for a couple of minutes (whilst I hid behind Sam) and then ran back to the safety of her tree root.

On our last night we got taken out in the canoe again. The caymans come out to hunt at night and we could see the glow of their orange eyes in the light from our torch, another slightly alarming experience. The wider the eyes the bigger the reptile and we spotted quite a big one from a distance. However by the time Alejandro had frantically paddled after it into the undergrowth on the edge of the lake it had disappeared. We did manage to get a close look at a baby one though, it just stared at us rather malevolently while I had visions of it's mother overturning our rickety canoe in an attempt to protect her precious offspring from the nasty humans taking pictures of it.

We got woken up at 6am on our last morning by the howler monkeys marking their territory. As you may have guessed they do this by howling. It's the strangest noise I have ever heard, a kind of loud but very low roaring, impossible to describe really. When I first woke up I thought we were in the middle of a enormous storm and the wind was howling through the trees but no, it was the monkeys. Amazing.